A temporary shutdown of sugar milling in western Kenya last year delivered an unexpected boost to producers in Uganda and Tanzania, as Kenyan traders turned to regional suppliers to plug a sudden supply shortfall.
Official figures show Kenya’s sugar import bill from the two neighbours jumped more than sevenfold to Sh6.17 billion in the three months to September 2025, up from Sh763 million over the same period a year earlier. The spike followed a directive by the Kenya Sugar Board ordering seven factories in western Kenya to suspend operations from mid-July, after stakeholders agreed that both lower and upper western regions were facing an acute shortage of mature sugarcane.
With local production constrained, traders and industrial users moved quickly to source table sugar from across the border to satisfy household demand as well as orders from food processors and beverage manufacturers. Uganda supplied the lion’s share, with imports surging nearly five times to Sh4.36 billion, according to data from Kenya National Bureau of Statistics.
Tanzania emerged as an unexpected new player. Imports from the country ballooned from just Sh9.5 million to Sh1.8 billion, a near-19,000 percent increase after barely featuring in Kenya’s sugar market the previous year.
The rush to imports marked a sharp turnaround from late 2024, when Kenya briefly enjoyed a rare sugar surplus thanks to favourable weather and subsidised fertiliser. At the time, output outstripped domestic demand, with production in September 2024 hitting 83,500 tonnes against average monthly consumption of about 80,000 tonnes. The short-lived boom drew praise from William Ruto during his November 2024 State of the Nation Address, when he spoke of a revived sugar sector and ambitions to turn Kenya into a net exporter.
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Those gains quickly unravelled. Erratic weather, harvesting of immature cane and poor replanting wiped out the progress, triggering a renewed shortage in 2025 and pushing prices higher. KNBS data show domestic sugar output fell 27.2 percent to 551,805 tonnes in the first 11 months of 2025, down from 758,302 tonnes over the same period in 2024.
Sugarcane typically needs 16 to 18 months to mature fully, but millers have increasingly been crushing cane as young as 10 months. The practice, often driven by competition between factories, has reduced sucrose yields, driven up costs and rapidly depleted cane supplies.
A joint November 2025 report by the World Bank Group and the Competition Authority of Kenya found that deep-rooted structural problems persist, with local sugar far costlier to produce than imports. The study noted that ex-factory sugar prices rose by more than 40 percent annually in 2022 and 2023, well above increases in cane prices and out of step with global trends.
In response, the government in May 2025 leased four State-owned mills, Nzoia, Chemelil, Sony and Muhoroni, to private operators, arguing that private capital would modernise equipment and improve efficiency. The move also paved the way for Kenya to exit the Comesa sugar safeguard regime in January 2026, ending 24 years of protection from cheaper regional imports.
With the removal of import caps that once allowed up to 350,000 tonnes of sugar to bridge local deficits, competition is set to intensify further, leaving Kenyan producers facing a harsher market reality amid high costs and unstable cane supplies.
